A crisis of contrasts

Project managers are having to deal with the extreme rises and dips in demand for products and services that the pandemic continues to throw at them. As companies boom and bust, they are the resolute navigators on hand to charter these choppy waters safely, finds Dave Waller.

When Aaron Abrams boarded a flight from San Francisco to Taipei on 18 March, it was his last chance to get home to Taiwan before the country shut its borders. And it gave him an early taste of the disorientation that would follow. Abrams landed to an unpleasant surprise: mandatory quarantine for 14 days. After being herded into long queues at the airport, he was given a government-issue trackable SIM card for his phone and then ushered to the plastic-coated back seat of a taxi, which ferried him to a shuttle bus. Here the driver sprayed him with alcohol and sent him to the back, before spraying himself, pulling a second mask over his first, and lurching the bus off into the sticky Taipei night.

Two hours later Abrams was back at his apartment in Taichung, holed up in his own guest room, isolated from his girlfriend, with only a cold bowl of beef noodle soup for company. It was here that Abrams resumed his role as director of product at Marin, the global bike manufacturer. Living in Taiwan, close to the epicentre of the global bike industry, he’s responsible for Marin’s model line, much of the sourcing of parts and vendor relationships, and liaising with assembly factories and others in the bike manufacturing chain. Demand for those bikes would soon prove as turbulent as his trip home.

The yo-yo effect

“The supply chain completely shuts for two weeks for Chinese New Year,” Abrams says, “and there’s always a big push to get into production as quickly as possible afterwards. But this year nothing came back – China went into lockdown and the lights stayed off for an additional month. So, as the country began gradually opening stuff up, there was a lot of push on them to get back to production as fast as possible and catch up.

“Then the really crazy part happened: the rest of the world started to go into lockdown. The first impression was that all economies were going to crumble, so the big brands pulled the plug on their orders. But a month later, the demand for bikes exploded internationally. Now those brands came back, asking for as much production as they could get, as fast as they could get it. And that’s the situation for the rest of 2020: the people making bikes just can’t make them fast enough. That swirling, stop-start yo-yo effect has been really hard to manage.”

Abrams’ personal perspective on demand will surely resonate with project managers the world over. And bikes aren’t the only sector to enjoy high demand in the crisis. Online grocer Ocado saw revenue leap 27 per cent in the first half of the year. Zoom was suddenly hosting 300 million video calls a day back in April. According to the Financial Times, Amazon’s market cap rose a staggering $401bn during lockdown (despite it shelling out $4bn to keep its logistics running through the pandemic).

Yet the vast majority of businesses are, of course, struggling. The UK economy contracted by a record 20.4 per cent in Q2, having fallen by 2.2 per cent in Q1, as restaurants sat empty, hairdressers closed and the arts sector fell to its knees, with the ONS reporting a £9.5bn drop in consumer spending.

In the wake of the pandemic, demand may form a trickle. It may be a flood. But for the thousands of project managers around the world charged with paddling the raft, it can mean challenging work either way.

The sweet smell of success

Andrea Cappi is a senior brand manager at Unilever, managing global innovation and communications projects for Dove deodorant. He understands that when offices and restaurants close and people stop going out, their underarm aspirations tend to lie fallow too. So he knew deodorant sales would see demand drop in the pandemic.

His team was already facing enough issues: how to test sample products remotely when touch and smell are such key factors; how to source basic ingredients when key supply centres such as India had gone into lockdown; and how to advertise the power of scent when you can no longer show people within two metres of each other.

To counter the issue of demand, Unilever put a laser focus on to its core products, which for Cappi meant Dove Original, at the expense of experimentation. “We know that consumers will look for better value, but that doesn’t necessarily mean cheaper,” says Cappi. “They need to feel that they’re investing their money in a savvy way. So we had to review a lot of the work we were doing to make sure our performance, our innovations and our claims were still relevant for consumers’ changing priorities. It meant some sudden changes of plans, and that made project management quite challenging.”

One of those changes lay in adjusting for increased demand through e-commerce, which had previously not been a typical channel to shop for deodorant. “All of a sudden we had to shift the content, the preparation, the availability of the product on a channel we perhaps weren’t fully exploiting before,” says Cappi. “Prior to the pandemic, only around five to 10 per cent of deodorant sales were made online. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s gone up two or three times.”

Managing costs: planning for green shoots

Those escalating numbers may well seem a very desirable problem to have, certainly for project management consultants. When whole industries are struck by the need to tighten belts, spending on external services is often one of the first things to go.

CPC provides project management services to a range of public- and private-sector clients across education, property and rail. As projects slowed and closed in the wake of the pandemic, demand for much of its project management expertise, notably in London, duly took a dive. CPC’s work at Transport for London, one of its biggest clients, fell by 70 per cent. And that’s not the only demand to drop: CPC’s overall revenue has been hit since late April.

“We were looking to grow the business from £25m to £30m over the next two years,” says Steve Mole, CPC’s managing director. “We now believe we’ll hit that in 2023.”

So how does a project management consultancy project manage its way out of that? The process has involved deleting all prospects it was bidding on, refining the business continuity plan and examining the various potential outcomes.

There is, of course, a stark limit on what they can predict, so cost-cutting has also been critical. “As soon as lockdown came in, we reduced the partners’ drawings by 40–50 per cent on a monthly basis,” says Mole. “We then introduced a salary reduction scheme of 20 per cent for all members of staff. And we placed a fifth of our staff – 39 people – on furlough with immediate effect. Those three measures saved considerable money, and outweighed the reductions in revenues. It gave us false profit for April, May, June and July, building up a little reserve for what we don’t know is coming in the future.”

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Another factor in riding out a drop in demand is maintaining a keen awareness of where the green shoots will spring up again. While the recent success of remote working suggests demand for commercial construction may dip, Mole is confident that the success of out-of-town retail parks and the need for regional distribution centres for e-commerce will keep his consultants busy. Not to mention the government’s need to pay for its furlough provision by investing in transport, infrastructure and major residential schemes.

Agility is the name of the game

Over at Unilever, the team showed similar opportunism. In July, CEO Alan Jope boasted of unlocking “new levels of agility in responding to unprecedented fluctuations in demand”. The company moved fast to shift people working on struggling areas to those, such as ready meals, where business was booming. Cappi recounts how his regular supply chain manager suddenly stopped working on their projects at the start of the pandemic and asked someone from his team to step in, so he could focus the next three months repurposing part of Unilever’s deodorant factory in Leeds to produce hand sanitisers, which were by that time in huge demand.

“That was a massive change, at a huge scale, in just a few weeks,” says Cappi. “It was very quick, but done properly, without taking production from products that required it, and they showed impressive agility in the supply chain, repurposing packs from other products. The team took it in the right spirit and made the new person’s job as easy as possible too. Hand sanitiser was a tiny part of Unilever before the crisis. It’s now a very sizeable business.”

Project managers need to embody this sort of adaptability in periods of unpredictable demand. As the need to find ways to do things faster gives way to finding efficiencies, this is not the time for simply checking how things are progressing against a pre-set project plan. This is about stepping back, seeing the bigger picture and being able to steer a team towards it as it unfolds.

“For project managers to be resilient to the crisis, they need an agile approach,” says consultancy PCubed’s Ben Whitlock, who has worked as a project management consultant in the aerospace sector – where the lack of international flights sent the supply chain, used to planning many years ahead, into a critical tailspin. PCubed has been supporting a major global aerospace manufacturer through the management of business improvement and transformation programmes. “They have to be good at getting a team together and going: ‘These are the things that need to be done, and between us how do we do it?’ Even as they have to keep changing, they’re able to tie threads across different functions in the organisation, talking across departments to get things mobilised.”

Adaptability: a new paradigm

“COVID has shown that the adaptability of the project manager is one of the strengths we have in the UK. And it’s something we’ll probably see more of as this unfolds: more and more project managers will need to develop this adaptability as a strength,” says Whitlock.

It’s certainly proven a strength over in Taiwan. As Abrams slipped into his quarantine rhythm of work emails, video calls and imagining lives for the people walking by his apartment window, bikes were experiencing their biggest sales boom since the oil crisis of the early 1970s.

“The new bike market is completely sold through at this point, almost everywhere,” says Abrams. “All through the chain – our suppliers, the assemblers making the bikes, the bike companies and the dealers – everyone’s having record sales. We’re getting calls from all over the world, from dealers and distributors asking what we have. They want our obsolete models. They’ll take anything that’s available, right now.”

It helps that Marin made some smart decisions – like not to delay any of its production. “We got in a good situation with a lot of our suppliers because we kept paying our bills and we never asked for anything but more,” says Abrams. “We never asked for a grace period on paying, and we didn’t cancel orders like a lot of brands did in that first panic window. Then the demand turned around on us and spiked.”

This fervent demand does come with its problems. The bike supply chain is complex, and certain parts that are indispensable for high-end models are in short supply. The challenge for Abrams lies in “trying to creatively figure out how to manage that situation, and duck and weave in this new paradigm”. Realising that all those cancelled orders must mean a surfeit of certain bike parts, he was canny enough to seek out what was available and buy up any excess.

“We used our bike frames and changed some of the specs to incorporate the parts that were available, to create new special edition bikes,” he says. “We’re making new models at similar price points – to supply to demand.”

On his fifteenth day back in Taiwan, Abrams stepped out of his apartment for the first time in two weeks and went to the new Marin office he was building, feeling good that work had been able to keep going without him there. And he went to his favourite restaurants, and drank “a lot of nice beer” at his favourite brewery.